What is the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution?
Equally important is the question, “What is it not?”. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not define the total scope of federal power as being that which has been delegated by the people of the several states to the federal government. I hear this often, and am guilty of repeating it myself on occasion. The Tenth Amendment does confirm, affirm, state -choose your verb – that however one defines the “scope of federal power,” those powers falling outside that definition are reserved to the states, period, end of story. However, as stated above, the conundrum is that the Tenth Amendment does not define the scope of federal power; the rest of the Constitution does – or is supposed to. That fact that the rest of the Constitution fails adequately to define the scope of federal power is a testament to some very flawed judicial interpretation and to a flawed Constitution that permits untethered judges to render such incorrect decisions with little or no consequence. The
